Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as “Your Intended Message”
What are the communication skills that an executive leader might need to develop and exhibit?
You might be brilliant, yet if you are unable to convey your messages or understand your people, you will fail as a leader. You are simply brilliant and might make a successful engineer, executive assistant or inventor but not an effective leader.
Where does executive communication start?
Speak with more confidence
When you are speaking, which do you believe Is more important? To feel confident or to appear confident? Think about that. You probably want both, but you can’t have both all the time. The question is which is more important? The answer is, it’s more important to appear confident. Why? Because that is the perspective of your listeners. Once you recognize that it’s about the audience experience and not your experience three factors work in your favor.
What I do for them is I observe how they come across and I think about who’s their audience. What does their audience need? What’s the mindset of their audience? And I help the executive deliver the message in a way that the audience gets it and understands it and acts on it. I saw one of your videos where you put it nicely. These senior executives are technicians. They know what they know, and they don’t know how to convey that effectively.
They’re not effective communicators. Yeah it’s true many leaders are leaders because of their technical expertise. They could be an accountant, an engineer or operations person and that’s how they got to lead their department and maybe eventually the company, but they are grounded in the technical part and that’s the language that they use. When they become the leader of an organization they need to speak the language of the common person the common person in the company and the common person in their market.
Here is a recent exchange gone wrong from a person who asked to be a guest on my podcast. Notice the mistakes. Remember that my podcast is titled, Your Intended Message.
People say silly and ridicules things in their Linkend profile.
This is an example of both silly and ridicules. Would you hire this person? Would you even invite this person to have a conversation? The Linkedin profile is vague, cliché and lacking in accomplishments.
This could easily be text that was lifted from a university text book.
Notice that not a single accomplishment is stated nor measured.
I asked him to clarify the purpose of this presentation. That’s the first place for you to start when designing, reviewing and adapting your presentation. That’s also how you should measure the success of your presentation. He paused briefly to think about that, then started to ramble. I smiled and cut him off. “What do you want people to think, feel or do after your presentation?” I could see the light bulb go on in his mind.
Think, feel or do?
What happens when your words sabotage your message instead of conveying it? As CEO of your company your words are important. The messages that you deliver in public are evaluated by your investors, staff, suppliers, customers, competitors, marketplace and media. People will judge you and your company by your words. They might misjudge your message. That’s why it’s important to thoughtfully choose your words to convey your intended message.
Your Intended Message is the podcast about how we communicate, the mistakes we make and how we might communicate better.
Your Intended Message is the podcast about how we communicate – mistakes we can avoid and how we can communicate more effectively.
Think about the last time you had a message go wrong. You didn’t know why. The receiver of your message didn’t get it or they reacted weirdly and you had no idea what their problem was. That’s the challenges that this podcast will address. Every week, I’ll interview experts on different aspects of communication skills.
